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Father’s Tough Life an Inspiration for Biden

WILMINGTON, Del. — Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. has worked with titans of the Senate and met countless heads of state. None of them have left as deep an impression on him as his father, Joseph Robinette Biden Sr., a prideful man.

Though life had dealt Joe Sr. a tough hand early in life in drunken, faithless bosses and a thieving partner, he never bemoaned his fate.

Joe Sr. had it all in his 20s, sailing yachts off the New England coast, riding to the hounds, driving fast cars, flying airplanes. A decade later, he found himself with a wife and four children living in a two-bedroom apartment in a dreary, treeless suburb of Wilmington, selling used cars.

His children saw hints of his former life in his wardrobe — he was always impeccably dressed with a perfect pocket square — and in the back of his closet, where he kept his riding pinks, his polished boots and his polo mallet.

His son the senator said the old man preached one lesson that had been the guiding principle in his own life, which has seen its share of defeats, some dealt by cruel fate, some self-inflicted. It is what has kept him going when he has faced tragedy and humiliation, the leitmotifs of the Biden story.

“My dad always said, ‘Champ, the measure of a man is not how often he is knocked down, but how quickly he gets up,’ ” Senator Biden said of his father, who died in 2002 at age 86.

This is the recurring theme of his speeches as running mate to Senator Barack Obama and the coda to many of Mr. Biden’s appearances on the stump.

“I’ve never seen a time in my career when so many Americans have been knocked down,” Mr. Biden said last week at a campaign appearance in Rochester, N.H., his voice rising, his face reddening beneath a thin crown of white hair. “As my father used to say, when you get knocked down, GET UP!”

He is almost screaming now, and the crowd is on its feet. “So GET UP! Get up and win in New Hampshire! Bring back the promise of this country!”

In his autobiography, interviews and speeches, Joe Biden paints an idyllic boyhood in postwar Scranton, Pa., a mythic place called Middle America where the children — three boys and a girl — went to school scrubbed for the nuns, dropped in for a matinee double feature at the Roosevelt Theater on Saturday and faithfully attended Mass on Sunday.

But life in Scranton was not always so easy for Joe Jr., who was born there on Nov. 20, 1942, the first child to Joe Sr. and Catherine Eugenia Finnegan, known to all as Jean.

Joey was a popular kid, if a bit quick with a punch, especially if someone teased him about his stutter, which he struggled mightily to conquer.

While Mr. Biden has described his early youth as stable and relatively carefree, his father suffered a number of business reversals, and for several years when Joe Jr. was young the Bidens were forced to move in with his mother’s parents, the Finnegans, in their modest home on North Washington Avenue in Scranton.

Though Scranton was sharing in the postwar economic boom, Joe Sr. had trouble finding steady work, and nothing that measured up to his previous success. For a time, he commuted to Wilmington to clean boilers for a heating and cooling company. In 1953, he moved the family there.

Though Joe Sr. was not a heavy drinker, alcohol flowed freely in the Finnegan house and in the neighborhood. Joe Jr. saw the toll it took on his family, his neighbors and, later, on his little brother Frankie. “Every family had it,” said Tom Bell, one of Senator Biden’s childhood friends from Scranton who remains close to him. “But the Finnegans had more than their share.”

Senator Biden does not drink at all, and he is frank about the reason. “There are enough alcoholics in my family,” he said last month as he sipped cranberry juice on a train ride from Washington to Wilmington.

Joe Jr. learned a number of lessons during his father’s lean years that he regularly cites in speeches and interviews. In his autobiography, he tells the story of his father quitting a job as sales manager for an auto dealership because the owner, who liked to reward his employees and customers with silver dollars, decided to amuse himself at the dealership’s Christmas party by spilling out a bucket of silver dollars on the dance floor to watch his workers scramble to scoop up the coins. Joe Sr. gathered up his wife and walked out, never to return.

He would stoop if he had to, to support his family, but not that low.

“That’s how you come to believe, to the very core of your being, that work is more than a paycheck,” Senator Biden said in his speech accepting the Democratic vice-presidential nomination. “It’s dignity. It’s respect.”

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These are bywords he returns to in virtually every political speech and part of his pitch to the working-class voters that are his target as Mr. Obama’s running mate.

After a few years in a drab apartment in Claymont, Del., the Bidens moved to a nondescript split-level home on Wilson Road in Wilmington, where they stayed until the children were grown. The Bidens scraped together the tuition for Joe Jr. and his brothers to attend the prestigious Archmere Academy. Joe Jr. called the school “the object of my deepest desire, my Oz.”

There, through an effort of will, he managed to conquer his stutter by reciting memorized passages over and over before a mirror.

He was an undistinguished student, but a standout athlete, particularly after a growth spurt in his midteens.

“He was a skinny kid,” said E. John Walsh, his football coach at Archmere, “but he was one of the best pass receivers I had in 16 years as a coach.”

In those years the Bidens were neither rich nor poor. Mr. Biden’s younger sister, Valerie Biden Owens, said she always had as fine a dress for school dances as her wealthier classmates at Ursuline Academy, the Catholic girls’ school she attended. The difference, she said, was that her parents bought them on layaway.

At the University of Delaware, Mr. Biden was more interested in football, girls and late-night gab sessions than in his studies. During his junior year, he took a spring break trip to the Bahamas, where he encountered Neilia Hunter, a Syracuse University student from a well-to-do family in Skaneateles, N.Y., lounging on the beach. “I fell ass over tin cup in love — at first sight,” he said, and set about pursuing her with a single-mindedness he has shown in his political pursuits.

To be closer to Neilia and her family, he set off after graduation for Syracuse Law School, where he flunked a class in his first year for failing to properly cite a reference to a law review article. He claimed the borrowing was inadvertent, and the school let him retake the course and put a letter attesting to his honesty in his file. Still, he finished near the bottom of his class. (The misstep came back to haunt him when a plagiarism charge ended his 1987 presidential campaign.)

He returned to Wilmington after law school with his bride, Neilia, whom he married in 1966, determined to burnish the Biden name. Corporate practice did not appeal to him, and he found that criminal defense work was not terribly lucrative. But politics offered him a ticket to fame, if not fortune.

In 1970, he won a seat on the New Castle County Council.

Two years later, local Democratic politicians asked him to serve as the sacrificial lamb in the United States Senate race against the popular two-term incumbent, J. Caleb Boggs. Mr. Biden was virtually unknown, had no money and, at 29, shy of the constitutional age to take the seat (his 30th birthday fell between the election and the beginning of the new Congress in January).

His friend, and later longtime chief of staff, Ted Kaufman, who worked at the DuPont Company and was active in Democratic politics, told him he did not have a chance of beating Mr. Boggs. But Mr. Biden, with Ms. Owens serving as his campaign manager and his entire family playing key parts, dived in.

Mr. Biden’s father appeared onstage at rallies with his son and went door-to-door for him. With his senatorial bearing and his creased suits, many voters mistook him for the candidate, who looked barely old enough to vote.

Joe Jr. won that 1972 race and was preparing to be sworn in when, just before Christmas, Neilia and their 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, were killed in a car crash that left his boys, Beau and Hunter, severely injured.

Mr. Biden was inconsolable, but he decided to hold on to his Senate seat. His sister Valerie moved in to look after the boys, and his brother Jimmy helped with the driving back and forth to Washington.

Joe Sr. took a step that year to lift his son’s spirits and bring an added measure of dignity and respect to the high office his son now held.

“After 1972, he gave up car sales and went into real estate,” Ms. Owens said in a recent interview. “He didn’t want a United States senator to have a used-car salesman for a dad.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: In a Father’s Tough Life, Principles and Examples For Biden to Live By. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe